ALIENS / The Work In Progress

Mother and daughter invite you into their creative world — a personal approach to traveling, gathering, filming, transforming, and performing a story on stage. This hour-long masterclass blends conversation with live, performed excerpts from their new work, breaking boundaries between art forms.

ALIENS is a multilingual live documentary — a journey across borders, memory, and identity. A real-life road trip from Donegal to southern Italy, where a mother and daughter weave their personal histories with the stories of Italian immigrants in Northern Ireland, as well as present-day migrants, activists, and strangers met along the way. Through performance, video, and live music, ALIENS explores what it means to live between countries, generations, and identities — a meditation on inheritance, migration, and the in-between spaces occupied by the so-called “aliens.”

Alessandra Celesia is a theatre and documentary director. Her films include The Bookseller of Belfast and The Flats, winner of Best Irish Documentary at Docs Ireland 2024 and the George Morrison Award at the IFTAs in 2025.

Marta McIlduff was selected as one of the “21 Artists for the 21st Century” in Belfast. She wrote and performed her first theatrical piece, Ligne 13.

Both trained at the Lecoq Theatre School in Paris — 23 years apart.

A co-production of Curious Industries and Dumbworld.

Part of Docs Ireland>>